Now that the dust is settling and the summer recess begins, the Congress and the Senate will head off to take their much deserved vacations where they will play catch up on their professional and recreational reading.
Imagine them lying under beach umbrellas from coast to coast and sipping their frosty drinks, as they open their canvas bags of recommended reads. For some Republicans it will be their treasured dog-eared copy of The Fountainhead (falling immediately open to the riding crop scene). For others it will be other old reliables like The Prince or perhaps The Wealth of Nations.
The Democrats are annoyed that they will spend much of their down time donating all the copies of Oliver Twist, The Jungle and The Grapes of Wrath strangely being sent to them by their constituents . Screw orphans, regulations and the unemployed! Talk about depressing. Jeez! And what's up with all the FDR and LBJ biographies?
For his part, President Obama opens his tote and settles back to relax with one of his all-time favorites - Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.
Later that afternoon, the President closes the book. Agatha Christie, wow! That woman is the most brilliant political thinker of all time. Let others have their Ayn Rands and Sun Tzus
Think I’m crazy? This whole train of thought began when I was ruminating about the Super Congress - 12 individuals who will have the ability to jointly kill off Medicare through cuts to providers and provide cover for everyone else in the process. I thought to myself, that is reminding me of something and later on it came to me - Murder on the Orient Express!
If you haven’t read Murder on the Orient Express, you may want to forgo this diary, although the beauty of Christie is that her books are completely re-readable, even when you know the plot twist. The beauty is in the “how” of the writing and the plot - the various red herrings and false villains that are trotted out and presented only to be refuted at the end where the outcome is no surprise IF you have been paying attention.
In Murder on the Orient Express, we have the case of a snowbound train where a murder occurs. We discover that the victim has twelve stab wounds. We also discover that every other passenger has a very powerful reason for desiring the death of the victim. The passengers are in collusion, all want the death but no one wants to be identifiable as the killer. Every passenger slips into the compartment of the victim and delivers a stab of the knife. Since it is unknown to the detectives in exactly which order they entered the compartment and which blow was the fatal one, all the suspects are all equally guilty and potentially innocent at the same time. Everyone has what we would call today “plausible deniability.”
I must confess, this is not the first time I thought of Murder on the Orient Express as it relates to President Obama, Democrats and politics in general. The first time was during the healthcare reform debate.
I would like to turn now to "The Case Of the Public Option"
(Please note - the following is not written with the intent of re fighting the HCR wars and to discuss whether or not the final bill was worthwhile or not - I am trying to confine myself to discussion of political strategy here particularly as it relates to my thesis of Agatha Christie as a campaign consultant).
The Public Option polled consistently well and was desired by the majority of Americans. Yet what America wasn’t privy to was the fact that the Public Option was one of the very first casualties in HCR. It was killed off early but with no fanfare in the initial round of private negotiations with Pharma and the Hospital Industry by none other than the White House itself.
Ironically, this was at the same time that people were screaming for leadership from the White House. We were getting leadership, in fact a shitload of it, we just weren’t aware of it and we didn’t know the direction it had taken.
Given the negotiated premature death of the PO, imagine the President’s horror as most of the bills being reported out of the House and Senate Committees assigned to HCR actually still had a Public Option! Something had to be done to kill off that which was already dead and the identity of the killer needed to be obscured.
The Orient Express Strategy was deployed at the final stage when the Senate Finance Committee took firm hold of HCR. Additional Public Option Killers were rounded up in the Senate. Thus we have an enlarged line-up of suspects to select from: Was it Olympia Snowe? Was it Max Baucus? Was it Blanche Lincoln? Was it Chuck Schumer? Was it Joe Lieberman? With so many perps to choose from, no one notices that the President has managed to slip off the train unnoticed, his footprints lost in the melting snow.
Once you recognize the Orient Express strategy, watch how it is deployed in almost every negotiation of note. The victim is always a Democratic tenet or purported goal (public option, financial reform, repeal of Bush tax cuts, entitlements,etc.) It typically involves the usual suspects (Blue Dogs, or sorry to say, the President himself) the scene of the crime is often the Senate and mistaken identity is always a key plot point - "But I thought he/she was a Democrat!?"
For this latest version of Murder of the Working Class on the Orient Express we now have the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction preselected to be our bi-partisan perps. Strange. They number 12, just like in the actual book. We also just witnessed the President himself buying the ticket for Medicare ( in the form of Provider Cuts) to ride the train. All aboard!
Next Up: The Obama Administration and the Murder of Roger Ackroyd.